I am the ancillary queen. I wear a crown of revolving doors woven with plastic six-pack rings. My robes are made of tinsel and stained tissue left by departing feet. I wield a scepter of twisted roses dried by sunlight; each stem with its severed head intact, petals long lost, old hips where once blooms rested, desicated, and thorns long ago worn to shiny smoothness for the weight of my hand.
I am the ancillary queen. My court, along the highway, is a quiet and well-kept cabin. The welcome mat and all things of this place are pristine; welcome is a given and offered most openly; all are accepted; the comforts I would know for more than a moment, first given, delivered every moment; demonstrating the knowledge of what it is to give and that the potential for such things lives here.
I am the ancillary queen. There is no facet of my being that exists except as utterly secondary to something or someone else. It has been so for as long as I can recall. How amusing, that I should think to change it. No amount of insistence succeeds; only solitude and silence in the wake of any such asking. No change in life circumstance and no amount of effort shifts it; it is monolithic reality, an axiomatic standard set in the ground of me. It is too much to ask, you see.
I am the ancillary queen. I forget, sometimes, and try to put myself first; but the world reminds me by drawing away like sieved water; the moment of lifting myself ensures its falling away. The reminder, now set upon my brow, I will savor every beautiful thing, even though it arrives with the sound of farewell upon its mouth; at dusk, by midnight, it is forever departing to the better place, the true beloved, forever and ever and a-men; endless departures and casual plans for “some other time” that dwindle into eventual silence.
I am the ancillary queen. The law is unwritten, unspoken, and inviolate; no matter the enjoyment “here”, all must ever go “there”.
I am the ancillary queen. I am a rest stop upon a highway; the convenience of a trash can and latrine; the “it’ll do until I get home”…
…and the place of bliss and belonging is a place is that is ever apart, elsewhere, and other…
…and home is anywhere but here.
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